Warning period: All adjusting to new downtown parking rules

Drivers in downtown Burlington have a couple weeks to adjust to new parking rules that started Monday — and shouldn’t be surprised to see a warning ticket on their cars in the meantime.

After conducting a study, the City Council voted to change the downtown parking rules, including shifting the enforcement hours and increasing the number of all-day parking spots in public downtown lots.

Instead of enforcing parking rules from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., the city will now patrol and ticket between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. during the week. In addition, Burlington set aside spots in parking lots 1, 2 and 3 for drivers who need to park downtown all day, in hopes of freeing up street spaces for customers.

“The goal of this is to get customers in businesses downtown,” said Chris Verdeck, assistant chief of the Burlington Police Department. “We want to get shopping back to downtown.”

Lenora Taylor, parking enforcement supervisor for the city, said for the first two weeks in July, parking attendants would be writing warning tickets for first-time violators as a way of informing them of the city’s new enforcement efforts. If a driver receives warning documentation and hasn’t moved his or her car within the two-hour window, a parking ticket will still be issued.

Taylor said the department would have a better idea in a few weeks of how the new system is faring, since downtown traffic is slower during a holiday week. The city, on average, writes about 45 of the $10 parking tickets a day, she said.

In total, Burlington has added 92 all-day parking spots in downtown public lots, and those spots are marked as such. In the past, Taylor said, though there were two-hour spots in the parking lots, the city didn’t write tickets for people who parked in those lots for longer periods of time. With the addition of specific all-day spots, violators will now be ticketed in the lots, as well.

“Our hope is that the number of tickets goes down and people comply with the rules,” Verdeck said.

Pam Watts and Nancy Roemer, sisters who are vendors at the Treasure House Shoppes, an antique store with entrances on Worth and Main streets, said freeing up more spaces for potential shoppers driving by can only be a good thing for business.

“I would hate to see parking (issues) be a deterrent of the resurgence of downtown Burlington,” Roemer said.

Brad Lingerfelt, an employee of Moorefield’s Florist on Front Street, said the business hasn’t noticed any problems with customer parking, and he has seen more foot traffic downtown than in recent years. He did think, however, that keeping all-day parkers from shuffling around spots on the street would help promote downtown commerce.

“If you want people to come downtown and shop, you have to make it easier,” he said.